WELCOME TO FEAR - NOVEMBER 2021

WELCOME TO FEAR

 

Last night I was listening to a podcast by my Mentor Michael Meade and became fascinated by the Sufi story about FEAR.

Mulla Nasrudin or Nasreddin, a 12 century Mulla (1208 – 1285) is still quoted in the Middle East and Tukey areas, where he lived and travelled on his faithful donkey. His stories are profound teaching stories. In this story he is dealing with a lesson about Fear:

One night, Nasrudin was riding his dinkey and suddenly heard a powerful noise near him on the road. He was overcome with fear and was about to run like mad, but he stumbled on a person.

“WHO ARE YOU? Asked the Mullah.

“I am a Dervish, and this is my place of reflection” he was lying on a cot in a poorly lit room.

“Well, you must let me in” said the Mullah, “for your snoring left me shaking with fear”

“Well, take the end of this blanket” said the Dervish, “but be quiet as I am in contemplation now”

Nasrudin became quiet and fell asleep. But in the middle of the night, he woke up and was thirsty. He woke up the Dervish and said: “Now I am thirsty”!

The sleepy dervish said: “Go down to the pond and get some water”

“NO”! Nasrudin said: “I am very frightened”

“All right” said the Dervish, “I will go but only because providing water to a stranger is a sacred obligation”

But the Mulla cried” “NO! do not go, I will be even more afraid if you go and leave me alone here”.

The Dervish said: OK, take my knife to defend yourself” and went to fetch the water.

Alone, Nasrudin worked himself into a lather of fear and was shaking all over. Soon the Dervish came back carrying the water.

“Keep your distance!” shouted the Mullah, “or I will kill you on the spot!”

“But I am the Dervish with the water for you!”

“I do not care who you are, you may be a robber or a fiend coming to hurt me!” Exclaimed the Mulla.

“But you were thirsty, and I brought you the water” said the Dervish.

“Do not try to make nice to me, you fiend” Said the Mulla, “be gone”!

“But that is my cell you are occupying”!

“Then hard luck to you - now you must find another place, you fiend” exclaimed the Mulla.

 “I guess I will have to, but I do not know what is going on here”! said the Dervish. All perplexed now.

The Mullah answered: “Fear is multidimensional. It is stronger than thirst, sanity, privacy, or property. You do not have to have it in order to suffer deeply from it.”

 

FEAR IN PANDEMIC TIMES

In today’s times of Covid pandemic, climate crisis, military coups, economic failures, and all sorts of corruptions, we have plenty of things to fear about indeed. When reflecting on the multidimensional causes of fear, we can reflect on these ‘causes’ in a psychological way. Here we discover that our “little ego” (I call it our inner child) wants to make sure that we are protected and safe all the time. Even safe from our own feelings that are inside and may be the energies to connect with the big Self or True self that deals with erasing fear when connecting with Soul that is the real source of all love and wisdom.

In the Mulla story there is a warning as to how easily we can find ourselves in a situation where the instinct to help others can encounter people who make demands out of fear and then we lose our centre and get lost in the drama of what I call the “poor me” syndrome that stems from neurotic fears of ‘something out there’. Also, giving a weapon to a scared person can lead to harm to one that is helping without awareness. Fear reverses a situation by creating more anxiety, more projections and more panic leading to damage of self and others.

Today the world situation is much the same where Covid pandemic (Panic) has been spreading globally and people are reacting with anxiety and get very fearful and feel great pain from losing their family members, and others are denying the reality of the disease and take on strong aggressive action against vaccination and hurt others with attacks against mask orders and border closures.

Further fears of the collapse of the economy, climate crisis and lack of clarity in political leadership, creates a space where the “little self” enters the survival mode (fight or flight) and thus people develop a strong lack of trust in others and begin to create a state of collective paranoia with the raise of conspiracy theories and false beliefs. The old extremist feelings emerge when fear is at the centre and groups evolve that are ready to ‘defend’ themselves and their families against any imagined enemy.

Historians state that during the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, people developed extreme beliefs in leaders that would save them. in Germany they supported the emergence of the NAZI party that promised health and wellbeing to all.

There is a similar surging of the extreme right and white supremacist groups that promise a new dawn for the good people and eliminate the bad. Some denigrate and deny the medical research and resist vaccination despite huge evidence of success in many fully vaccinated countries. Some believe that only god can save us and urge people to pray for a cure from heaven.

Unfortunately, many people do not understand the phenomena of fear as an energy that drives us into panic and all sorts of self and others harming behaviours. The loss of rational thinking collapses the intuitive centre and a loss of inner resources that give us a chance to evolve and grow even if fear is so strong that blinds us from resetting our lives towards real growth and development.

INTUITION AND AWERENESS are the main tools of developing strong capacity to deal with fear. This way we realise that fear is a door to our own survival as it generates body/mind hormones that energize us into positive beings that have been living on this Earth for many thousands of years developing solutions from the Big Self. Seeing the direction fear is guiding us (with awareness) we evolve as a greater human.

Any emotion (or motion) and particularly fear can move us to a massive amount of information and knowledge to be able to resolve our life issues, but by repressing our emotions, we lose our emotional intelligence and become more lost to our creative resources. As a wise teacher said: “who fears to suffer winds up suffering from fear” Courage wakes up in times of fear.

 

 

NIHILISM AS A SOCIAL CRUTCH - OCTOBER 2021

 

NIHILISM AS A SOCIAL CRUTCH

                                                                                               the expanding universe

 

Definition

Nihilism (/ˈnaɪ(h)ɪlɪzəm, ˈniː-/; from Latin nihil 'nothing') is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects general or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values or meaning. Different nihilist positions hold variously that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some sets of entities do not exist or are meaningless or pointless.

Dear reader,

October is my month - I was born in October. This time, I am reflecting on a topic that is as mysterious as it is dark - It is called NIHILISM. That is a topic that has been debated for many years by academics and philosophers. The main protagonist of this idea was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche - 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900. A philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, writer, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history.

To understand how a purposely empty way of viewing the world has become filled with such darkness, it pays to spend some time with Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche hated systems and fixed moral principles; he saw no objective order to life beyond what we give it. Many choose to fixate on this rejection of traditional belief systems and understanding of meaning. Yes, he felt that moral and social conventions stifled individual thought and reason − but he didn’t say we should destroy them for the sake of it. Another master of nihilism (although he was not aware of this modern name) was Buddha.

Nirvana and nihilism

The culmination of the path that the Buddha taught was nirvana, "a place of nothingness…non possession and non-attachment…[which is] the total end of death and decay." Ajahn Amaro, an ordained Buddhist monk of more than 40 years, observes that in English nothingness can sound like nihilism. However, the word could be emphasized in a different way, so that it becomes no-thing-ness, indicating that nirvana is not a thing you can find, but rather a state where you experience the reality of non-grasping.

In the Alagaddupama Sutta, the Buddha describes how some individuals feared his teaching because they believe that their self would be destroyed if they followed it. He describes this as an anxiety caused by the false belief in an unchanging, everlasting self. All things are subject to change and taking any impermanent phenomena to be a self-causes suffering. Nonetheless, his critics called him a nihilist who teaches the annihilation and extermination of an existing being. The Buddha's response was that he only teaches the cessation of suffering. When an individual has given up craving and the conceit of 'I am' their mind is liberated, they no longer come into any state of 'being' and are no longer born again.

Nihilism is one of those terms that everyone uses very freely, often without fully understanding what it means. It is subbed in for ‘negative’ or ‘depressing’, a perennial indicator of a bad vibe. So, before we can examine our changing relationship to the concept, we must reflect on it carefully:

Nihilism is a nice “crutch” that most modern people use when they are faced with fear and anxiety. Now we have the global pandemic called COVID-19 and responses to this crisis has divided the world into two camps:

a)       Those who promote the need to vaccinate everybody in order to stop this virus and

 

b)     Those who say that Covid is not only the only problem, but we are experiencing the climate change problems, neo-liberalism and the failings of capitalism and the demise of democracy.

 

We, therefore, are experiencing a major loss of control of our daily lives and consequently, many people cannot find any meaning in life, and many suffer mental health problems and as well as chronic loneliness particularly we see this in many youths who are feeling a lack of adult guidance and are seeking (mainly online) an ideal way out. Enter Syfret, Wendy the Australian author of “The Sunny Nihilist” She states:

“Sunny nihilism breaks away from the previous fixation on destruction by viewing pointlessness as a chance to breathe and think. Ultimately serving as a blank page, a chance to enjoy the moment, the present, the chaos and luck of being alive at all”

After examining in great detail the philosophy of Nietzsche that spanned over a century, she offers the possibility to change our relationship with the term NIHILISM. She calls for a new revision of the idea and thus creates a shift in using the negative belief into a positive perception and thus, creates a new paradigm.

My own reflections on the dark side and the light side of nihilism led me to evolve the third side that comes from the gestalt therapy work and that is make a dialog with both sides or polarities and discover the possibility to become aware of a third side. The ideas that emerged for me, seeking the third side, came from the reading the book THE URBAN MONK by Shojai, Pedram. He is a master monk and a teacher.

 

THE WISDOM OF URBAN MONK

We live in a culture of proclamations instead of self-inquiry. What this means is that, at the ripe age of 17 or 18, we must decide what we want to be for the rest of our lives and somehow announce that to the world. “I’m going to be a doctor, lawyer, programmer, teacher . . .” We end up making a proclamation about who we are based on what our whimsical interests were in our late teens and are oftentimes stuck with this decision for the rest of our lives. Suppose we decided to be a lawyer because we wanted job security and were good at reading; we then find ourselves surrounded by other lawyers for much of our lives. If we then decide to practice criminal law, we could then find ourselves with clients who may not be too savoury. Doctors are surrounded by sick people and other doctors. Teachers are saddled with politics and crowded classrooms. Essentially, if we are what we eat, the decisions we make early in life oftentimes surround us with the types of people we’ll engage with for decades. This isn’t inherently bad, but what it does is serve us with a worldview that reinforces a fabricated identity. Who we think we are is compounded by who buys into that role? All of this happens at a time in life when we should be asking an important question instead: Who am I?

BIG PICTURE EXERCISE

A powerful way to frame a transformation in your life is to change your current circumstances in a hypothetical scenario and play it out. Ask yourself: If time, money, and place were not a consideration, what would I love to do with my time? Then ask yourself the following questions:

 ​Why? ​What can I do to go there?

​What stands in my way?

 ​Is it a real or a perceived limitation? ​

How can I transform these obstacles?

​How can I change my current lifestyle to accommodate this and move toward the goal I planned?

HERE ARE SOME WAYS TO DO THIS:

Stress

Being saddled by too much stress impacts the immune system and the nervous system, and it messes with our metabolism. It cuts flow to the frontal part of the brain, which is the part associated with higher moral reasoning and the critical thinking capacity that makes us human.

Time

 Time connects us to all the power in the Universe. Our better understanding of what it is and how we can exist within the flow of it will liberate us in ways we can’t even imagine. Time is one of our greatest teachers and an ally in life. It is the anchor of our being; when we squander time, we waste our life force. Because we are disconnected from our essential selves, we spend it frivolously and speak of being bored.

Energy

 This is the currency of life. As you may recall from martial arts, qi energy can be cultivated into Shen (or Spirit). This becomes the juicy stuff that helps us connect with the life all around us. It is the fabric of consciousness that we share with all the life around us, and it is something we can enhance and refine with our practice. The baseline is having a robust, healthy system that flows with qi. Getting out of our own way and then refining our energy into spirit is the way of alchemy and one of the missing pieces to the “lack of purpose” dilemma we face in the West.

Sleep

What goes up must come down, and sleep is where we heal on the soul level. It’s where our subconscious minds connect with the collective unconscious and where we derive meaning from our day’s events. Most of us are so far behind in sleep debt that we always feel like something’s missing. Correcting this and connecting with our daily “small death” helps us tap into the web of life. When we have adequately slept, our baseline anxiety starts to go away, and we regain the focus and perspective to find answers for ourselves.

Stagnant lifestyle

Now is the first time in human history that we’ve become so stagnant, sitting around most of the day. Many of us are lost and disconnected from our primal roots. Getting moving is essential to unlocking our vital energy and activating key genes that code for growth and longevity. When the body doesn’t move, it signals a shutdown and makes the mind dull, leading to a sense of disconnection and unease. Purpose doesn’t always hit you over the head. It comes naturally once we’ve turned our lights back on by getting back in the flow of movement.

Diet

Good food powers the brain and activates higher spiritual centres to wake us up. Bad food does the opposite; it lulls us to dull sleep and messes with our energy flow. Getting on the right side of this equation is critical. You can’t eat junk and expect to find some higher purpose in life.

Nature

As the shamanic teacher Alberto Villoldo says, in the West, we are the only people who see ourselves outside of the Garden. The perception that we were evicted from a natural paradise has cut us off from the profound respect for the natural world that is bred into so many cultures. We tear through forests, mine through mountains, pollute rivers, and fill the earth with plastic shit we didn’t really need. Disconnecting from nature pulls us from the umbilical cord of the universe and separates us from all the other life to which we are bound.

Loneliness

There is no such thing as loneliness when we find God, Truth, or whatever you need to call It. When we’re disconnected from our essential selves, we feel isolated and confused. Tapping into our childhood passions and understanding that we’ve all got bullshit we are carrying around is the first stop. We can then find meaning in each other. We can understand our common plight and see ourselves in others. As we take care of ourselves and vitalize our own lives, we can support others and tap into the energy of service.

Money

 There are lots of wealthy people who lack meaning in life. They go on expensive retreats, wear the nicest yoga clothes, buy lots of massages, and are still miserable. Money doesn’t buy meaning if you’ve bought into the false promise of conspicuous consumption. Use money to fuel your dreams and lead you on a life of adventure and inquiry. Use it to help others and make the world a better place. Meaning isn’t bought. It is home grown.

It is easy to forget how at the beginning of the pandemic, things felt briefly surmountable. When the numbers were low − and for those of us living on an island at the edge of the world, the crisis far away − people liked to talk about what this unparalleled break in normality ‘meant’. We told ourselves it was nature hitting back after centuries of abuse, a call from the universe to slow down, some cosmic reminder to get to know our neighbours better or finally tidy up the balcony. Clearing out cupboards, archiving family documents and calling old friends, so many marvelled, ‘I never would have gotten to this without a pandemic.’ We looked for reason within the blooming chaos because reason and meaning are the superstructure, we’ve been taught to build our lives within.

 

 

Your comments will be greatly appreciated.